Subtitle: Fred Coe and the Golden Age of Television
Author: Jon Krampner
Subject: General Interest/Media Studies/Popular Culture
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2359-1
Pages: 272 pp. 20 b & w illus.

"Jon Krampner has done the impossible: made sense of Fred Coe's brilliant, but tragic life. Coe was a man with the gift and vision of a D. W. Griffith, and in this insightfully researched book he finally gets his due. Fred's voice is heard and his signature is seen. Krampner has unsealed Coe's legacy."--Bo Goldman, screenwriter, winner of Academy Awards for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Melvin and Howard

Today television drama consists mainly of formulaic series and TV movies filmed in Hollywood. During the 1950s, however, there was a "Golden Age" of television--live electronic theater based in New York was broadcast to living rooms across the country. This book is the first biography of the man who almost single handedly made that Golden Age possible: Fred Coe (1914-1979)

Coe, the greatest producer of this era, was the mastermind of Philco-Goodyear Playhouse, the best of a crop of live New York dramatic anthologies that included Studio One, Kraft Television Theatre, and Robert Montgomery Presents. Born in a small town in the Mississippi Delta and raised in Nashville, Coe went on to nourish such impressive talents as writers Paddy Chayevsky, Horton Foote, Tad Mosel, and J. P. Miller, directors Delbert Mann and Arthur Penn, and countless major actors.

Among the enduring live dramas he produced are "The Days of Wine and Roses," "Marty," and "The Trip to Bountiful." (for Playhouse 90); Mary Martin's acclaimed Peter Pan; and the situation comedy Mr. Peepers. Coe later made several films and became an important producer on Broadway, with The Miracle Worker, Pulitzer prize-winning All the Way Home, and A Thousand Clowns (which he also directed) to his credit.

To a large extent, though, the rise and fall of Fred Coe parallels the rise of live television drama in the late 1940s and its fall at the end of the 1950s. Jon Krampner's lively book brings the postwar New York era to life along with a gallery of memorable characters. He provides the most sustained look yet at the causes of the growth, efflorescence, and decline of a remarkable period in American television history.

Jon Krampner is an expatriate New Yorker who lives in Los Angeles. He is a contributing editor of Emmy magazine and has written on television and entertainment subjects for the Los Angeles Times, Playboy, Modern Maturity, the New York Times Syndicate, and numerous other publications.

Key Points

o The first biography of an important television pioneer

o Provides important new insights to the early years of television history and production

o An affectionate look at New York in the postwar period

o Chronicles the rise and fall of serious television programming and production